Women’s writings as evidence for linguistic continuity and change in Early Modern English

The section heading ‘The history of non-formal styles and registers in English’ raises a number of questions to do with the reconstruction of the spoken language of the past. As audio recordings only go back a century or so, historical linguists’ data sources are necessarily limited to written materials. With no direct access to even interviewed speech, let alone to the vernacular,1

there are obvious problems in using written data sources to access the less formal end of the stylistic continuum at any given time. And the further back in time we go, the narrower the range necessarily becomes.